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Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right 1st Edition
Purchase options and add-ons
* How to upgrade your hopelessly outdated and obsolete-software dependent site and bring it into the Drupal mainstream and future
* How to become a great Drupal themer and make "non-Drupal" looking sites
* How to really customize Drupal for your real needs
* How to start using best practices in Drupal web application development
* How to work like the pro Drupal shops and be ready for big projects - and small ones
* Learn by example (code samples, theme samples, videos) at every step
- ISBN-100470410876
- ISBN-13978-0470410875
- Edition1st
- PublisherWrox
- Publication dateFebruary 3, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.4 x 1.02 x 9.2 inches
- Print length480 pages
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Leveraging Drupal®
As an open source, community-based content management system and web site application development framework, Drupal allows you to create interactive, media-based, database-driven web sites that become a part of everyday activities and communications. This unique book is the first of its kind to tackle the challenging task of leveraging Drupal to get a site done right and make that site work for you, based on industry-wide software development best practices.
Within these pages, you will gain insight into how to work with any release of Drupal, approach your project, establish a development environment, plan for deployment, and avoid pitfalls along the way. A real-world example of a web site application based on Drupalan online Literary Workshopis used throughout the book, and it walks you through the entire development lifecycle. You'll learn how to bring your web site into the exciting Drupal mainstream, customize Drupal for your specific needs, and even make "non-Drupal" looking sites. With this hands-on guide, you'll discover how to use Drupal to efficiently publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on your web site.
What you will learn from this book
Best practices to optimize the way you approach development projects
Methods for setting up a development environment using version control and issue tracking tools
How the Drupal theming system works and how it separates content from presentation and style
Techniques for upgrading and deploying the online Literary Workshop
The future of Drupal and how it might be developed and used
Who this book is for
This book is for Drupal users of all levels of expertise who are looking to put together a sophisticated web application.
Wrox guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think. Written by programmers for programmers, they provide a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.
Product details
- Publisher : Wrox
- Publication date : February 3, 2009
- Edition : 1st
- Language : English
- Print length : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0470410876
- ISBN-13 : 978-0470410875
- Item Weight : 1.52 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.4 x 1.02 x 9.2 inches
- Customer Reviews:
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2009In creating web sites, there will be those who will find their strength in the Theming/User Interface side, and those who are wizards at functionality, creating modules that add yet more capabilities. I would consider this book best for the project manager or small shop developer who has to oversee the entire process while interacting with clients, developers and designers, and wants a thorough approach to successful use of Drupal for any size application.
While relatively new to Drupal, I have designed and developed web sites since 1995. I believe the most common problems or bottlenecks come not nearly as much from the question of the software chosen or even the design, but resolving what the site is supposed to do, who is going to use it, and how it will be managed and maintained. This became a greater issue when non-technical administrators took over the mundane tasks of refreshing content, approving users, etc., through the use of user-friendly content management systems. Development expanded and widened in scope, and content management systems are now complex applications.
As Drupal has risen in popularity through its flexibility, scalability and stability as a CMS platform, a good number of books have come out to help developers jump on board, some with a focused approach on building functionality or designing themes, while others offer more general instruction on setting up and getting a site online. Victor Kane's book falls somewhere between both, but adds two components that often are not accounted for in this kind of "how to" book.
First, he explains how to create a framework for approaching software/web site development that begins with client-oriented goals. He specifically advocates the use of an Agile approach, dedicating the first chapter not to Drupal per se, but to putting a plan in order before unpacking the software or installing a single module. He consistently refers back to this approach as he guides the user through the development of a model site (an On-line Writing Workshop), returning to Agile development more deeply in Chapter 11.
Second, while many development teams attached to IT departments in larger companies or agencies are used to keeping track of revisions when a job is split up between many programmers, the "one-man team" can learn best practices through the software examples given in the book that explain the hows and whys of keeping a web-based tracking system for Drupal site development. More than just mentioning this as good advice, he puts it to practice throughout the book. I haven't seen this discussed in most books about open source CMS development, and I think it's worth noting. You will learn about Version Control nearly as much as you will learn about Drupal from this book!
Where there might be more than one way of doing something, such as installing Drupal onto a home system for testing or loading it onto a shared host, he will give as many as two or three different ways to do so. There is little he doesn't discuss thoroughly, and he invites the reader to join him in expanding and improving the lessons in the book through a web site he has set up to continue the learning/mentoring/sharing process that is a hallmark of the Drupal community's approach to "world domination".
As with other books on Drupal, you might want to have some books on PHP around, along with a little background in Unix/Linux shell commands, CSS and HTML for reference. He adds a chapter on jQuery and is probably the first in print with some content on Drupal 7, which is projected to arrive in late 2009.
It's a great addition to the growing number of books on Drupal, and stands out for his unique discussion of planning and versioning, which is applicable to any web project.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2014even a good book can't make a difficult subject simple....maybe this is for someone who wanted more info than i did. i started to read itand set it down and bought a video series and a few other books and never returned to this one...it was over my head when i bought it..maybe all my fault- it was wrong level for me
- Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2010This book is well written and walks you through the process of creating different solutions in Drupal for a variety of use cases. I recommend it to anyone looking to expand they're Drupal ability.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2009This is not your typical how to book that starts from simple concepts and gradually builds into more complex areas. It starts by going into team roles and responsibilities, a subject that is seldom mentioned in any software book, and jumps right into the deep end of the pool with version control. There are screen dumps of terminal processes and code sprinkled throughout.
That is not to say that concepts are not adequately explained. They are, or that the small shop wouldn't benefit from this book. It can. It's just that the reader will find subject progression to be a bit different than typical. It works, especially within the context of the project the book covers, a writing workshop site.
As far as post-production responsibilities goes, that is one that is generally not addressed before website development and that lack shows in poorly maintained sites and inter-organizational bickering if not addressed early on in the process. I'm glad to see it mentioned here. That point highlights the audience for this book. It doesn't seem written for the lone developer or small team that builds third party sites but for an IT department that will deploy the project and maintain the site.
The project the book details, a membership based writing workshop, is well conceived as an example of the Drupal's extreme flexibility. The third party modules used, like CCK and Views are the foundation add-ons for custom Drupal sites. Other helpful modules, that I haven't used before are also covered and well. The book simultaneously covers version 5, 6 and 7 of Drupal, which could be useful within a company that has to maintain its own sites.
How to create custom administrative views for different site users is well covered. The resulting website is truly custom but in usable real-world ways. And I appreciate the short chapter on jQuery and the little preview of Drupal 7.
For someone who has at least some basic Drupal chops and wants to see how a real expert goes about developing a site, this is could be a good addition to the bookshelf.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2015I found the first 100 pages or so helpful; very full of links to resources and "deep dives" for the topic at hand. The rest of the book I can't really comment on as I didn't do any of the hands-on, read and code along work. I read this on a Kindle and I will warn anyone who reads this on a Kindle that most of the screen captures and table illustrations are next to impossible to read as they were not re-formatted for the device. In many cases there was so little contrast between the text and shaded backgrounds that these elements were pretty useless. Another format gripe: discussing an illustration or screen capture more than one screen away from the element itself. Probably isn't an issue in the paper edition, but annoying in the Kindle version. Don't the publishers QA these things on the device before release?
Top reviews from other countries
- Ian FlamingReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2010
5.0 out of 5 stars The perfect book for drupal-powered website developers!
I am in total awe of Victor Kane, the author of this excellent book. He is clearly a genuine master of the art of software development. If you follow along with him and do the exercises, you'll not only demystify everything Drupal, you'll learn and use the same techniques that professional software engineers employ to achieve high quality - such as creating a minimal number of bugs along the way! Victor shows you how to get your development environment properly organised with an SVN repository for source code. You'll soon be wondering how you ever managed without version control and issue tracking!
This is the only book on Drupal I have so far found (this book is my fourth) that fully explains the reasoning behind Drupal's structure in terms of what it is striving to achieve - it is not simply the seperation of content from presentation - Victor points out that data often has a certain structure that is more content than presentation. Typically, Drupal encapsulates this concept marvellously with the ubiquitous "node" type.
So if you really want to become an expert Drupal Themer (and this is where the real action is), I can't rate this book highly enough.